Don't build on or depend on google products.. That is the message they are sending
Seriously. They have been sending this message out for more than a decade now. Every new Google product or service that is any good will be shut down at short notice just when people start getting used to it. Only the search engine and Gmail endure.
People think Google is in the business of providing services. They aren't. They're in the business of data collection and their services exist to facilitate that. Useful data dries up, service shuts down, every time. It sounds harsh but people who still use Google services are just setting themselves up to get fucked over.
Google is in whatever business they decide to be, and saying that they're expected to leave abruptly because the well dried up is not an acceptable answer. Ultimately it just tarnishes the brand and dooms whatever new things they try to venture into. Stadia never got off the ground for this very reason.
Google's not going to be able to collect a lot of data if no one trusts them to run a service for more than a couple years. Hell, can I even trust them to keep Chromium going at this point!? Surely they won't let that waterfall of data dry up...
RIP inbox
Yes you said new product now they are killing established products. This has been out for just under a decade.
Yup. I migrated everything out of Google when they killed Listen. Was on the edge after Inbox, but Listen was the last straw. They don't know how to keep great products alive, and I'm tired of getting suckered punched by them.
Exceptions are Android (because there's no other options) and Angular/Golang, because they would survive being abandoned by Google. Hell, they'd probably improve!
Came here to comment that — glad it was the first comment
This site is interesting... every time you reload it, the short blurb about each tool changes. Is it using a llm, or do they write alts that get served at random?
The Google Graveyard grows ever larger. Nearly at 300 now.
Yeah, this is basically their business model/modus operandi
This was a trip back in time, seeing things like Meebo and Picasa that G purchased and killed off. 😕
That's just the nature of corporate pirates, they loot and plunder what they can use and integrate into their own products then scuttle the rest
To be slightly fair a decent number of those are redundant or were successfully merged into other projects while others were clearly very experimental in nature.
This product was also sold, not deleted. So to be a bit pedantic, it doesn't belong there. People are acting like this has died entirely or they aren't able to transfer their domains. It's not the end of the world.
But I guess people can feel good posting "Don't be evil I guess" over and over again (as has been posted in all the threads about this numerous times) or being all snooty about how they've "warned people forever" not to use any Google service ever.
I still miss igoogle at times
We can’t even trust google to run a registrar!?
I'm still amazed that they decided to do this, given how involved they are with this type of thing.
I had already moved to porkbun, but Google Sites was such an easy way to make a simple webpage with a domain.
I will never trust Google for anything since they killed off Google Plus. Getting rid of "don't be evil" as their corporate motto was a huge giveaway.
I use Google Fi for my cell service and have loved it, but them killing off or selling so many of their products has me real nervous over here...
Based on my experience in many privacy roles covering US, EU, UK and other countries, the sale of a company will likely be covered in Google's privacy notice and is not considered a sale of personal data considering customer's personal data will immediately be covered by the purchasing company's privacy notice.
Funny, because if I decided to go into business with Google by renting a service from them, that honestly shouldn't mean that I automatically decided to go into business with some other corporation at Google's whim.
But hey, capitalism really cares about personal autonomy. It's not like it just exploits our labor and treats us like commodities or anything. /s
I think what they mean to say is, me big you small
This is so fucking annoying. I specifically used Google Domains so I can have a trivial email forwarding to my Gmail without data exiting Google's servers.
I'm in the same boat you are, I had numerous domains (over a dozen) each with e-mail forwards to a single gmail account. I ended moving my domain registration to AWS Route 53 and pointing my DNS over to cloudflare. Cloudflare offers both DNS and e-mail forwarding for free, so I'm back in business. They also provide analytics on email forwarding that google lacked. not gonna miss google one bit.
Yep... I saw this last week and transferred my domain to CloudFlare afterwards. It took me a day or two to get it all fixed back up with my iCloud stuff and other DNS crap, but it's done now. I'm really getting sick of google killing all their products.
Same thing for me, my domains were set to renew in August, but I transferred to Hover (cloudflare didn't directly support my tld) but I set up my nameservers with Cloudflare.
Everything google touches dies, I'm very distrustful of any of their services, I should probably think of moving off gmail too haha
Was even easier for me since I was already using cloudflare as my dns for my domain so it all just stayed the same
If you trust google with absolutely anything then you are a fool. They start and close things constantly. You should 100% expect any google service you use to shutdown at any time.
They had 10 million domains (according to the article). Even with a successful business they drop stuff. Maybe I am a fool!
only 10 million domains?
Now i understand. Upper management compared the numbers to the usual numbers they see (billions of google accounts for example) and saw "what the hell? Only a dozen million domains? Literally nobody is using the service, get rid of it"
The article covers this a little bit, but I thought I'd share my email response from Google when I asked them "how can I prevent Squarespace from receiving any of my data?" They responded with:
Based on the summary you have shared, I understand that you need help with your general inquiry about the Google Domains transition to Squarespace. To answer this, if you will be transferring your domains out of Google, all of the data will also be removed. This means that once the transition between Squarespace and Google happens, your data will also be removed.
I responded to this and basically said, that wording is ambiguous. Will my data be removed before or after the transition? They replied:
I'm sorry for the confusion. To be clear, Squarespace will not receive any of your Google Domains data. Only the active domain names, excluding the domain names that have been deleted or transferred out, will be affected by the data shift to Squarespace.
So if I trust their word, it means, if I've already transferred out my domains (which I have), Squarespace shouldn't receive any of my customer information, or even have a record of who I am. Hopefully that's true.
Another Google service destined for the glue factory.
I mean, this is Google we're talking about...
Been bought by square spaces.
Squarespace announced today it has entered into a definitive asset purchase agreement with Google, whereby Squarespace will acquire the assets associated with the Google Domains business, which will be winding down following a transition period. This purchase includes approximately 10 million domains hosted on Google Domains spread across millions of customers.
Who are surprisingly expensive.
I’m super pissed about this.
I have a ton of client domains registered with google, and squarespace’s pricing is double.
They had by far the best platform I’ve used for managing domains. This sucks.
I’m so annoyed. Squarespace is the worst
I thought that was godaddy?
Google Fi customers beware. I've been saying for a while it could be next and always met with the argument "well actually it's easy for them to run and profitable so it's definitely safe." By the looks of this nothing is safe besides their most core products
Google: the grim reaper of online services
Hold up - can anyone else read many of the comments in this thread and notice that many seem to be bots, all repeating comments by other users but slightly changed as if by AI and automated?
The commentary in this thread reads as very unnatural. (I agree with the skepticism of Google, it’s not that, it’s the syntax of the thread).
If you made yourself dépendant on a Google product then that’s the risk you assumed. They can and will kill off products at a whim, history has made that very evident.
This is so frustrating, I knew that I should never trust google but i still fell for the slickness and how easy it is to administrate domains on google domains so I've been buying all my domains through them... I really really gotta learn to stop trusting google and basically never use their products.
Lots of top-quality dumb news this week
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A few years ago I hit a point where the Google graveyard got so large that I no longer trust them with any of my stuff. I know the mantra is to always have multiple backups of important stuff, but I’ve started doing Google drive, OneDrive, iCloud, AND local (own cloud) copies of stuff because you just never know when Google is going to decide to kill Google maps or Google photos or whatever.
I transferred my domains out as soon as I heard of the purchase a few days ago. It's a shame but not a surprise given Google's desire to kill anything that gets good.
I don't think I have any infrastructure that runs on Google anymore with that done, which is a shame as I like their products before they are shut down
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